Part 7
"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at
her face, "wandering alone so far from home?"
"I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.
"Solitary walks?"
"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things."
"Problems?"
"Sometimes quite difficult problems."
"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,
for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at
home--under inspection."
She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of
her free young poise show in his face.
"I suppose things have changed?" she said.
"Never was such an age of transition."
She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto
me is the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an
epigram.
"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl
intrigue me profoundly. I am one of those people who are
interested in women, more interested than I am in anything else.
I don't conceal it. And the change, the change of attitude! The
way all the old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing.
And all the old--the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at a
touch. If you had lived twenty years ago you would have been
called a Young Person, and it would have been your chief duty in
life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to
understand."
"There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that
one doesn't understand."
"Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg
your pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite
well in your heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young
Person! she's vanished. Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young
Person! . . . I hope we may never find her again."
He rejoiced over this emancipation. "While that lamb was about
every man of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We
wore invisible chains and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can
gossip at a gate, and {}Honi soit qui mal y pense. The change
has
given man one good thing he never had before," he said. "Girl
friends. And I am coming to believe the best as well as the most
beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."
He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:
"I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man
alive."
"I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica,
keeping the question general.
"Oh, there's no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties
broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back
to the very beginnings of that--it's been one triumphant
relaxation."
"Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?"
"Well?"
"I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the
same. A woman isn't much freer--in reality."
Mr. Ramage demurred.
"One runs about," said Ann Veronica.
"Yes."
"But it's on condition one doesn't do anything."
"Do what?"
"Oh!--anything."
He looked interrogation with a faint smile.
"It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the long
run," said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. "Until a girl can go
away as a son does and earn her independent income, she's still
on a string. It may be a long string, long enough if you like to
tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is! If the paymaster
pulls, home she must go. That's what I mean."
Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed
by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed
to Hetty Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he
asked, abruptly. "I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It
isn't such fun as it seems."
"Every one wants to be independent," said Ann Veronica. "Every
one. Man or woman."
"And you?"
"Rather!"
"I wonder why?"
"There's no why. It's just to feel--one owns one's self."
"Nobody does that," said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.
"But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on
his own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company,
makes his own way of living."
"You'd like to do that?"
"Exactly."
"Would you like to be a boy?"
"I wonder! It's out of the question, any way."
Ramage reflected. "Why don't you?"
"Well, it might mean rather a row."
"I know--" said Ramage, with sympathy.
"And besides," said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside,
"what could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession.
But--it's one of the things I've just been thinking over.
Suppose--suppose a girl did want to start in life, start in life
for herself--" She looked him frankly in the eyes. "What ought
she to do?"
"Suppose you--"
"Yes, suppose I--"
He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more
personal and intimate. "I wonder what you could do?" he said.
"I should think YOU could do all sorts of things. . . .
"What ought you to do?" He began to produce his knowledge of the
world for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong,
rank flavor of "savoir faire." He took an optimist view of her
chances. Ann Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on
the turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked up to
discuss a point. In the meanwhile, as he talked, he scrutinized
her face, ran his eyes over her careless, gracious poise,
wondered hard about her. He described her privately to himself
as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from
home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While
the front of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the
hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea
that for women of initiative, quite as much as for men, the world
of business had by far the best chances, the back chambers of his
brain were busy with the problem of that "Why?"
His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by
a lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he
dismissed that because then she would ask her lover and not him
all these things. Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple
restlessness: home bored her. He could quite understand the
daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited. But was
that enough? Dim, formless suspicions of something more vital
wandered about his mind. Was the young lady impatient for
experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he did
not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more
than a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept.
If it was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the
lover not yet incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected. . . .
He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that
his chief interest in life was women. It wasn't so much women as
Woman that engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking;
he had fallen in love at thirteen, and he was still capable--he
prided himself--of falling in love. His invalid wife and her
money had been only the thin thread that held his life together;
beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving
series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing,
interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had been different from
the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive
freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how men
could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful
research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing,
these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and
mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest
of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for
it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.
So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his slightly
protuberant eyes were noting the gracious balance of her limbs
and body across the gate, the fine lines of her chin and neck.
Her grave fine face, her warm clear complexion, had already
aroused his curiosity as he had gone to and fro in Morningside
Park, and here suddenly he was near to her and talking freely and
intimately. He had found her in a communicative mood, and he
used the accumulated skill of years in turning that to account.
She was pleased and a little flattered by his interest and
sympathy. She became eager to explain herself, to show herself
in the right light. He was manifestly exerting his mind for her,
and she found herself fully disposed to justify his interest.
She, perhaps, displayed herself rather consciously as a fine
person unduly limited. She even touched lightly on her father's
unreasonableness.
"I wonder," said Ramage, "that more girls don't think as you do
and want to strike out in the world."
And then he speculated. "I wonder if you will?"
"Let me say one thing," he said. "If ever you do and I can help
you in any way, by advice or inquiry or recommendation-- You see,
I'm no believer in feminine incapacity, but I do perceive there
is such a thing as feminine inexperience. As a sex you're a
little under-trained--in affairs. I'd take it--forgive me if I
seem a little urgent--as a sort of proof of friendliness. I can
imagine nothing more pleasant in life than to help you, because I
know it would pay to help you. There's something about you, a
little flavor of Will, I suppose, that makes one feel--good luck
about you and success. . . ."
And while he talked and watched her as he talked, she answered,
and behind her listening watched and thought about him. She
liked the animated eagerness of his manner.
His mind seemed to be a remarkably full one; his knowledge of
detailed reality came in just where her own mind was most weakly
equipped. Through all he said ran one quality that pleased
her--the quality of a man who feels that things can be done, that
one need not wait for the world to push one before one moved.
Compared with her father and Mr. Manning and the men in "fixed"
positions generally that she knew, Ramage, presented by himself,
had a fine suggestion of freedom, of power, of deliberate and
sustained adventure. . . .
She was particularly charmed by his theory of friendship. It was
really very jolly to talk to a man in this way--who saw the woman
in her and did not treat her as a child. She was inclined to
think that perhaps for a girl the converse of his method was the
case; an older man, a man beyond the range of anything
"nonsensical," was, perhaps, the most interesting sort of friend
one could meet. But in that reservation it may be she went a
little beyond the converse of his view. . . .
They got on wonderfully well together. They talked for the
better part of an hour, and at last walked together to the
junction of highroad and the bridle-path. There, after
protestations of friendliness and helpfulness that were almost
ardent, he mounted a little clumsily and rode off at an amiable
pace, looking his best, making a leg with his riding gaiters,
smiling and saluting, while Ann Veronica turned northward and so
came to Micklechesil. There, in a little tea and sweet-stuff
shop, she bought and consumed slowly and absent-mindedly the
insufficient nourishment that is natural to her sex on such
occasions.
